The unread book meme

[trixtah]

Ganked from epi_lj

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today whenever this was originally posted). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)- I persisted because I liked the writing style. Shame about the plot and characters (I don't like creepy adult fairy stories)
Anna Karenina (132) - I didn't read much of this
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110) - I think my most prevalent feeling was that I wanted to slap all of the characters
The Silmarillion (104) - I got through it eventually. I shouldn't have bothered, really.
Life of Pi : a novel (94) - not in the slightest interested - I seem to be allergic to whimsical "magic realism" (since I like SFF, god knows what my problem is)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) - most of the "classics" bored me about 100-150 pages in.
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84) - god, I hate Joyce. Yes, fabulous, breaking the constraints of the sentence... but it's nice to actually understand what's going on.
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73) - we had a copy of Bulfinch's mythology when I was a kid. I loved it.
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73) - I just don't gel with Atwood, but I keep trying
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70) - I like Woolf's essays. Fiction, not so much.
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68) - don't like Gaiman either, but I kept trying (although I've now given up)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67) - I have no idea why I even started it. Even the name is irritating.
Atlas shrugged (67) - I thought it was good to "know thy nemesis"... not in this case.
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66) - trashy, but I finished it.
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65) - couldn't stand it.
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63) - I did try, with Joyce.
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58) - this came out after I gave up with Gaiman
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57) - although I've given it to three people to read
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54) - no more Hardy, ever again.
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51) - I dislike misery-porn
The god of small things (51) - beautiful prose, but the miserable ending was set up about 1/3 of the way through the book, so I didn't bother with the denouement.
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51) - I desperately want to read this. Soon, I hope.
Cryptonomicon (50) - ah, geek-wanking. I don't have much tolerance for being told how much the author knows about obscure subject X in fiction.
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49) - I'm a very bad feminist - I don't like this at all.
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47) - fuck, I hate MZB's fantasy. Her Darkover books are decent, despite their limitations - they're not nearly as turgid.
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47) - wank wank wank. Unappealing main character, a tedious plot, and self-consciously "literary".
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46) - talk about wanting to slap protagonists.
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45) - I've tried reading this about half a dozen times. I might get there one day.
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44) - yet another seminal book I want to read.
White teeth (44) - eh. I couldn't see what the fuss was all about, although it was vaguely entertaining.
Treasure Island (44) - yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)